SCALES #51: cube rule
Hello!
Time today for an end-of-year check-in with my “go-to 2018” playlist. A reminder of the ground rules: music released this year, ordered by when I added it to the playlist. Currently sitting at 64 songs, 4 hr 12 min (Spotify).
1) The 1975, “TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME”: A Lindsey Zoladz review reporting falling for an of-the-moment new album encouraged me to give the 1975 another chance—and now, somehow, after an evening of YouTube immersion, including an entertaining chorally enhanced Ariana Grande cover, I find myself improbably sold. The band is often framed as grappling with the question, what is a young, center-of-pop-music-conversation-aspiring white dude rock band to do in in a time when rock has drifted pretty far away from the mainstream? (Other than I guess cheekily naming themselves after a decades-old year.) In this song, the answer is make a pop confection structured around a classic “numbering off” conceit: counting from one up to four, then back down through three before landing on the kinda-titular digit. Throw in some warbled autotuned vocals involving, in part, an argument over social media liking habits, an extremely charming “everyone is dancing and singing along to this bop” music video, and you’ve got, well, maybe not a rock song, exactly, but definitely a catchy slice of today. (YouTube)
2) Arctic Monkeys, “Four Out Of Five”: Another British rock band grappling with their sound in 2018. But Alex Turner & Co. are a little older, a little less concerned with chasing popular success. So: a further retreat from earlier brashness into self-assured, loungey, Bowie-indebted crooning. The retro-space futurist video matches the “sound of rock’s future in the past” musical approach. It’s a grower: the groove, the Moon-base-gentrification lyrics, the melodic hook, the final cheesy announced semitone modulation—it all slowly starts to feel inevitable. (YouTube)
3) Rosalía, “Bagdad (Cap. 7: Liturgia)”: First drawn in by the “Cry Me a River” J.T. interpolation, but then captured by the flamenco rhythms, the chromatically circling vocal lines, the unexpected appearance of (I think?) a children’s chorus that somehow pulls all the drama together. (YouTube)
4) Mary Halvorson, “Pretty Mountain”: Thorny avant-jazz vocal lines that still worm their way into my head. Different moments draw me through the track: the trumpet interludes, the angular scat break, and the surpise arrival in a space with brighter and more open harmonies, shaking off the doubt and asserting, “Big deal, pretty mountain”. (Bandcamp)
5) boygenius, “Ketchum, ID”: Three-part harmonies, a soft-spoken lament about dissociation and placelessness felt as a musician on the road, the dream of a place to settle down. I hope the Idaho tourism board is working to make the most of the moment. (Bandcamp)
6) Neko Case, “Curse of the I-5 Corridor”: Pretty foundational to my musical taste is how much I enjoy Neko meta-textually signposting “the instrumental over the bridge” right before exactly that. And as always, I like how through-composed her songwriting is: harmonies, melodies, time signatures are all quietly mutable, in service of what she is trying to communicate. The further gift of an explicitly autobiographical Neko Case song prompting me to dig into her back catalog and hear similar gems for the first time: “Thrice All American”, “South Tacoma Way”. (YouTube)
7) Tyler, the Creator and A$AP Rocky, “Potato Salad”: This ain’t a purse, it’s a satchel. (YouTube)
[Playlist of the 7 above songs, on Spotify]
And on the subject of 2018 pop music, some thoughtful perspectives: Jon Caramanica argues for profound streaming-mediated shifts in the sounds of pop-as-genre (with some great sidebar graphics); Switched On Pop‘s Charlie and Nate use the hundredth episode to discuss their show’s evolving relationship to pop and music theory; and, as part of the Slate Music Club 2018 discussion, Ann Powers identifies one trend in the pop music that resonates with the contemporary moment:
“Many of my favorite recordings of 2018 were made by perceived outsiders cultivating resistance by expressing themselves, challenging historical norms, and just being fierce. There’s a reason “Thank U, Next” became the year’s anthem the nanosecond it came out: With her resolute determination to thrive despite repeated encounters with tragedy, Ariana Grande is our divine messenger right now, and her message is love and patience and learning from pain.”
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(Mexican neighborhood, not Italian city)
I saw Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma in theater. An lovingly detailed, deliberately laid out, very film-y movie that I’d definitely recommend seeing on a big screen (though maybe not with a rowdy burlesque Nutcracker crowd upstairs intermittently interrupting quiet moments).
[Extremely vague “spoilers” ahoy, perhaps?]
Even in my limited knowledge the movie seemed like a self-conscious skeleton key to Cuarón’s oeuvre and influences—I caught a hilariously heavy-handed Gravity easter egg, a very Children of Men-esque heartpounding setpiece shepherding a quasi-divine pregnancy through a world whose political stability feels like an increasingly thin veneer and in which violence can erupt from nowhere (though this time with an even more harrowing childbirth scene), long shots of empty domestic interiors that I imagine to be an Ozu homage without ever having actually seen a lick of Ozu—and an image of lines of cars stopped in tunnel traffic can’t not be in dialogue with 8½, right?
And (as the title itself probably winkingly gestures to?) the entire approach has a deep debt to Italian neorealism, which I am all for. Patience, attention to little lived-in details, watching the life of Cleo unfold, a product both of her decisions and the place in society she was born into.
Some other filmic touches I enjoyed: the opening surges of water cleaning the floor echoed by later ocean waves; the language of slow horizontal rotations of the camera giving a liberatory feel the rare times the camera rotates skyward.
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~Good~ Criticism: Two Entries
1) In a piece on (the previously unknown to me) Lucia Berlin in LRB, Patricia Lockwood is just so good at the key critical tasks of observation and description:
“Berlin’s gifts are not ones you have ever tried or been told to cultivate. The details she chooses are those you have purposely eliminated, with that hitch in your ear that tells you to keep everything timeless: names of gas stations, laundromat chatter, ringworm cures. Gentian violet! She maintains the private, freaky sensuality of a child who listens for certain satisfying sounds, sniffs for certain satisfying smells, puts marbles in her mouth, has a pet percolator named Skippy, grows up to write a whole story about macadam.”
2) I forgot how much I’ve missed Wesley Morris regularly doing film reviews until I read some recent ones. Doesn’t matter how insipid the movies sound (here: Aquaman); Morris zeroes in on what’s interesting and makes sure the review itself is a pleasure to read:
“In another age, Paul Walker would have played [Aquaman]. Now he’s this imposingly big, impenetrably chill, multiracial, biker type, sheathed in tribal tattoos, with a long, dark mane. (Now, only the highlights are blond.) That physique is a draw. You could make a taco with the crease in his back, and his pecs almost whisper for a pillow case. This is to say that [Jason] Momoa might be the last person you’d pick for somebody named Arthur but the first for a movie in need of a star to plow shirtless from one wet location to another.”
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Final 2018 Odds & Ends
Craig Mod laying out the imagined and actual evolution of book technology. In his view, though much of the wild dream of interactive, hyperlinked, multimedia ebooks has failed to materialize (or materialized in places we classify as not-book), what has changed are the economics of book-making, enabling new kinds of writing and funding: self-publishing, Kickstarter, and, in what I of course am sympathetic to, giving a privileged role to the email newsletter in all of this.
A charmingly ridculous, overly reductive, Sol LeWitt fever dream of a food classification system: “pizza is toast, a quesadilla is a sandwich, a hot dog is a taco, key lime pie is a quiche, and a burrito is a calzone.”
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This is it for SCALES in 2018! Have a restful end of your year.
Thanks for reading! You can always forward to a friend/reply and say hi/subscribe.
—Adam